Culture Change at IBM IBM began in 1914 as a maker of cheese slicers, scales, and tabulating machines.

Thomas Watson, its founder who became famous for the "Think" watchword, created the company on three values called "Basic Beliefs:" "respect for the individual," "the best customer service," and "the pursuit of excellence." Based on these values, IBM grew into one of the great industrial giants of the world, routinely hailed as a "best managed company."

By the late 1980s and the early 1990s, however, IBM's enormous success had an unintended consequence. The firm became complacent; its basic beliefs provided a rationale for stability. "Respect for the individual" had morphed into an entitlement mentality where lifetime employment was reinforced by cultural norms. The "pursuit of excellence" gave way to corporate arrogance and a failure to listen to customers or the marketplace because IBM knew what was right. Finally, its devotion to large, centralized computer systems rather than PC-based distributed architectures led to its downfall. IBM's stock price dropped 75 percent between August 1987 and September 1993.

To turn things around, IBM appointed Lou Gerstner CEO in 1991. When asked how he would lead IBM, this former GE executive retorted: "The last thing IBM needs right now is a vision." Over the next few years, Gerstner cut IBM's workforce in half, abolished lifetime employment, and refocused business strategy from hardware to software and services. The spectacular success that followed is regarded as one of the great turnarounds in business history.

So what would you do as the CEO who followed Gerstner? Sam Palmisano, a lifetime IBM employee, was appointed CEO in 2002. He strongly believed that IBM's continued success depended on re-laying its foundation. "We couldn't be casual about tinkering with the DNA of a company like IBM. We had to come up with a way to get the employees to create the value system, to determine the company's principles. Watson's Basic Beliefs, however distorted they might have become over the years, had to be the starting point."

To clarify and shift IBM's culture, Palmisano orchestrated a process that began with the corporation's top 300 executives. Together, they generated the basic categories for the new values, including respect, customer, excellence, and innovation. These categories were tested in focus groups and broad surveys with more than 1,000 employees across levels, locations, and functions. Based on this input, three proposed valuescommitment to the customer, excellence through innovation, and integrity that earns trustwere submitted to "Values Jam," a 72-hour process where all employees at IBM were invited to comment on the proposed values via IBM's intranet. Values Jam organized employee discussion around four forums. A company values forum asked general questions about the importance of values. A "first draft" discussion forum asked for reactions to the three proposed values. A third forum asked about IBM's value in society, and a fourth asked people to describe IBM when it was at its best. Including Palmisano, 50,000 employees made over 10,000 comments about the company's culture and identity. The following were some early-on comments:

"The only value in IBM today is the stock price." "Company values (ya right)." "I feel we talk a lot about trust and taking risks, but at the same time, we have endless audits, mistakes are punished and not seen as a welcome part of learning, and managers (and others) are consistently checked." "There appears to be great reluctance among our junior executive community to challenge the view of our senior execs." "Many times I have heard expressions like Would you tell Sam that his strategy is wrong?'" However, after initial feedback about why things weren't working or wouldn't work, the debate turned more positive. Eventually, a small design team took all the comments, looked for themes, and revised the proposed values into "dedication to every client's success," "innovation that mattersfor our company and for the world," and "trust and personal responsibility in all relationships." Palmisano announced them in November 2003. The feedback, in the form of postings on the intranet and more than a thousand e-mails sent directly to Palmisano, was "these are fine . . . show me."

In the final stage of the culture intervention, Palmisano sponsored a series of change projects to demonstrate how the values would be used to make decisions and manage the company. One project was dubbed, the "$100 million bet on trust." It was in response to a story that Palmisano heard about an IBM employee prototyping software for a client in Tokyo who immediately needed a software engineer based in Austin to help configure a server. The employee couldn't get the help right away because a charge code was first needed so there would be a way to account for the software engineer's time. In effect, employees were unable to respond quickly to client needs because financial control processes required several levels of management approval. Although the money would usually be approved, it was often too late to be responsive. To address these issues, the $100 million bet on trust gave each manger in a pilot group up to $5,000 annually to spend, no questions asked, to respond to extraordinary situations that would help generate business, to develop client relationships, or to respond to an IBMer's emergency need. Subsequent evaluation showed that the money was being spent wisely. There were several examples of teams winning deals and delighting clients with a small amount of immediately available cash. Consequently, the program was extended to all 22,000 first-line managers. Palmisano was convinced that allowing line managers to take some reasonable risk and trusting them with those decisions would pay off. More importantly, the program symbolized living the IBM values.

Another important change to reflect the values better involved setting prices. Values Jam surfaced many stories about the difficulty of pricing a customer solution that involved a variety of products and services from multiple IBM groups. Since each brand and business unit had its own P&L, an across-IBM bid was usually pulled apart by each unit and run through the financial accounting system as separate bids for individual products and services. This made it extremely difficult to come up with an all-inclusive price, which ran counter to IBM's value of client success and the strategy of being able to offer a total solutionhardware, software, services, and financing. In one classic case, IBM's CFO was putting together a deal for his partnership account that involved hardware, software, and services. He was told by the finance function that he couldn't price it as an integrated solution. In other words, IBM's CFO was told he couldn't offer the deal he was proposing!

In response, IBM developed an integrated bid system to better reflect its values. All of the people who set prices for clients were brought together and told, "You work for IBM. When there's a cross-IBM bid with multiple products, you price it on the IBM income statement, not on the income statements of each product." This led to a series of intense meetings with senior executives about allocating integrated bids to business-unit P&Ls. IBM made it work because it was the right thing to do in aligning the organization to its values.

The IBM culture change was led by senior executives and involved the whole organization in discussing and debating the firm's values and identity. There was remarkable agreement on what the values should be. The debate, as it turned out, wasn't over the values themselves but on whether IBM would be willing and able to live with them. To make this happen, specific organization changes were made that symbolized the values in use.

Which of the following is a major reason for the culture change at IBM? a. To break from Watson's Basic Beliefs b. To increase profitability c. To improve employee satisfaction d. To align with the new strategy of software and services